March 2014

Signs and Symbols

Of her work, artist Libby Black writes, “Making the work is a way to take pleasure in re-creating attractive objects while also coding my identities (as a daughter, a lesbian, an artist, a mother, a dreamer).” My recent artistic practice involves creating playful, intuitive, and beautiful objects that are also metaphors of identity. The x motif in my recent work represents unity and duality, and also self-presentation: variations on what we make clear and what we hide, what we show or mask.

Themes of selfhood are also encoded in a painting through process, as a work’s change and growth is like the fluid and complex evolution of personal identity. I think of each piece as an independent and singular thing, a self in its own right. I work on it until it feels differentiated and discrete, but raw enough to seem about to change and shift, to slip at the edges. It is whole and open, ready to exist in relationship to other pieces alike and dissimilar.

 The varied works in this show speak to my intuitive process of making things. Through exuberant play and improvisation, I try to resist firm limits. The resulting works are disparate, but also part of a whole: a very particular ensemble of individual objects and relationships. This composition of textures, materials, colors, and connecting and contrasting symbols are a document of my process and meditations on what it means to be a thing, a person, a meaning. 

Becca Kallem received her MFA in painting from the University of New Hampshire, with a BA in Art and Spanish from the College of William and Mary. She held a Fulbright teaching fellowship in Madrid, Spain and has taught painting and drawing at the George Washington University, Arlington Public Schools in Arlington, Virginia, and for community center programs in the DC area. She has held residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Most recently, her work has been exhibited at Washington and Lee University and Heiner Contemporary in Washington, DC. She is a resident artist at the Arlington Arts Center and a member of the Sparkplug artist collective.

Visit the artist’s website at beccakallem.com